Crafter 2D / Blog: Recent posts

After a longer period of holiday and other projects, today a new release of Crafter 2D has been officially published. Origanally it was planned earlier with fewer addition, but as development continued more and more was added with a great result!

This new release brings a more integrated and complete package. The Crafter Workshop package has been greatly improved. New features include a revived undo-redo mechanism for the world editor, redesigned tile selection widget, line numbers, compiling and running projects and many more! ... read more

Version 0.7 contained many improvements with the YASC compiler and some minor improvements in the engine and Crafter Workshop. For the next release many new features are planned for both the Crafter Workshop to improve the usability and experience of it. In this post I will shed some light on the on-going developments that are taking place or have been done already for version 0.8.

Done this, done that..

In the past month I gave quite some development love to the Crafter Workshop as I felt it needed more functionality to make it really usable for the creation of a game. Features that have been added are improved project management, including building all resources and launching the game. During the build process all scripts are compiled and the c2d files are generated. Any errors that occur are displayed in a new Output panel. Script errors are click-able bringing you to the line in the source file where the error has been detected!... read more

Lately I have been very busy working on converting the script language Yet Another Script (YAS) to become a module. The first part was not that difficult to achieve, though obviously I pulled more on my plate than first anticipated. Let me explain what I was working on.

YASC

The ANTLR parser version I am currently using is not suitable for the Windows RT/Phone operating systems. It contains calls to sockets for debugging purposes, which are not supported on those platforms. Therefore I decided to split up the parsing, error checking, etc. and compiling just like the content files: sources files and compiled CIL files.... read more

Today's topic is about modules. Modules are the main enhancement of the upcoming version 0.5.1. With modules everyone can extend the engine without having the alter the original sources of the engine. This means that people can add other physics- or sound engines, but also complete packages like an RPG pack that adds common RPG features (e.g. inventory, quest system, etc.) to the games using it. As you can see, modules open up a whole new world for third party developers, while at the same time keeping the engine as lean as possible.... read more

I just released the first version of the Crafter Workshop, the tool with which to create all your cool games for the Crafter 2D game engine! Currently it is still far from that goal, but at least there now is a foundation, which in upcoming versions can be extended and improved with new functionalities.

With the current version you can only create and edit game worlds. The tool has a fairly simple user interface, enabling you to quickly edit worlds. It is also possible to create and edit the bounds (= used to keep characters from disappearing in impassable terrain). Usage documentation about the tool will be written on the wiki somewhere in the near future.... read more

After long waiting, the newest version is finally there! This first release as Crafter 2D is already a milestone. But this version comes with much more. It contains many improvements and large parts of the engine are rewritten. For example the previously common C++ Actor class will not be there for too long anymore. Instead the Entity class has been extended with a component system. This approach, although very new for me, makes the entities more modular. The new file streamers can now automatically generate entities and its accompanying components.... read more

It was already posted on the forum, but here is the official word! JEngine SSE is going to be renamed to Crafter 2D. In the past I got some remarks about the current name of the engine. The main points where:

• JEngine : Due to the J it was interpreted by people that it was an engine written in Java. This is not the case. It is written entirely in C++ (although in the early days it started as a pure C implementation).
• Side scroller : people thought that the engine could only do side scrolling. Again this is not true. The engine supports scrolling in all directions. Besides that the engine also supports two different types of maps: top down/side (the standard platform games) and an iso metric view. The later still requires a lot of developer love though.... read more

Developments for the next release are in progress. This next version of the engine will be version 0.5. A huge number of changes have been worked on in the previous months. These changes include:

• improvements to the graphics engine
• brand new sound engine based on FMOD
• rewritten script engine that is more extendible (see previous post)
• component based entities with a more modular file loader
• many more improvements and bug fixes... read more

JEngine SSE has had a custom scripting language for a while now. Up until now it always has been referred to as 'script language' or just script. For a long time I have been thinking about a proper name, which is one thing I am not very good at, hence the simple name. Today I decided that I will go with the name YAS : Yet Another Script. In the coming period I will update the documentation here on SourceForge.... read more